How I helped allUP increase user activation by simplifying and refining their product
Product Design
Product Strategy
Design System
website development
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Impact of my work
Retention
Simplifying onboarding flows, reducing friction to complete tasks, and creating new features usersz.
These helped to increased retention.
Efficiency
Figma Design System, clear communication, making the team & users’ lives as easy as possible. I helped the team be more efficient
Growth
Bring the founder’s ideas to life, proactively refining our product, showing potential futures via prototyping.
This helped allUP grow their user base and company.
firstly, what is allUP?
A "Professional Network for People over Networking"
allUP is a professional social network built upon video testimonials. Your profile is built using videos testimonials from yourself and others.
It's designed to help individuals stand out in the job market beyond traditional resumes, allowing them to be discovered for opportunities where they are the perfect fit
Industry
Consumer, Social, Hiring
total Team size
10 ~ 15 people
My role
Product Designer
Research
Design
Prototyping
Problem solving
Platforms
iOS app
Web app
Webflow Website
The situation
allUP was growing, fast.
When I joined the team in 2023, they were receiving a massive influx of users. Exponential growth is amazing, but also worrisome as the the product's design had not been meaningful improved in over year.
There were inconsistencies across web and mobile, a scattered design system, and backlog of projects and improvements needed.
If these were left unaddressed, it could lead to users churning fast, stunting long term growth.
solutions
My role as a product designer
I was brought on to improve design and functionality. I saw this as finding solutions to ambiguous problems, advocating for users, and helping allUP grow. Being a scrappy startup, I wore many hats at allUP.
This meant:
Redesigning key pages and flows in our mobile & desktop app
Working 1-on-1 with the founders to bring their ideas to life
Collaborating on PRD’s in Notion to clarify ambiguous problems
Researching competitors and advocating for our users
Building, managing, & maintaining a design system in Figma
Designing & developing landing pages on our Webflow Website
Success metrics and KPIs
Defining what success meant
Every project had a key metric we would anchor against to ensure success. Here are the 3 most important ones.
key metrics included:
Increasing user activation. HMW get more people to finish profiles?
To share their account? To engage with others?
Reducing churn rate. HMW reduce drop offs? Which friction points can we reduce and remove?
Increasing onboarding conversions. HMW simplify onboarding? HMW make recording easier? HMW make inviting friends more enticing?
Here are a few key projects that helped us achieve these success metrics
Instant feedback concept and prototype
Giving people confidence with the assistance of Ai
Our goal at allUP was to build confidence in people.
One bet we made to achieve this was to utilize AI to give people instant feedback on their videos.
I led the project from concept, ideation, prototype, and launch.
I explored a number options, ranging from simple to complex.
The one you see here is my favorite, a chat that would invite people to ask more.
As we discussed tradeoff, we decided to ship a simpler version due to feasibility and timelines.
Increased user engagement and show the capabilities of allUP’s AI.
Before
After
iOS profile design
Simplifying a complex profile
A user should feel proud of his profile, especially when it leads to him getting new opportunities.
The current profile had problems with unorganized content and poor text hierarchy.
This led to profiles being hard to skim, and people not feeling like their best foot was being put forward.
I led the end to end redesign of user’s profiles. My goal was to improve the visual hierarchy, to put more sections visible above the fold, and to make it much easier to skim.
This was received very well by our users, and led to more profiles being and shared
Profile completeness — Different stages and screens
Making progress easy
During discussions with users, they would often say they didn't know what to do once they signed up. They’d poke around a few screens, not find anything to do, then leave.
This led to lots of uncompleted profiles & low user activation.
After internal discussions, we decide to take a bet on providing people a clear and concise path to complete their profiles.
This become colloquially known as "Profile Completeness"
I designed the flow from start to finish. Key parts included:
A card on profile’s to tell people what they needed to do next
A progress bar to showcase clear movement towards a goal
Clear copy conveying the value of each step
Keeping steps minimal to now overwhelm people
This led to 24% increase in profiles being filled out and a 31% increase in videos recorded
Hiring manager landing page in Webflow
Developing landing pages in Webflow
Having 10+ years experience using Webflow, I was able to create, design, and manage our website. I helped setup our CMS and blog, built and animated landing pages, and optimized our site to load fast.
Candidate review page, desktop
Helping allUP bridge into a new offering of job hiring.
In 2024, we saw an opportunity in the market to assist with hiring.
Since we were using videos that would allow people to tell their full story, we felt this was a perfect fit for helping both candidates and teams.
I helped the team bridge this gap into this new offering for both our iOS and web app. I designed onboarding flows, job application pages, review and candidate pages, and much more.
I anchored all designs and decisions on transparency and clarity. People didn’t know who allUP was yet, so we needed to build trust and make it clear to people what we’re offering.
This led to 2x user growth month over month, with meaningful increases to conversion rates & users activation.
Creating a congruent design system
The problem was that the existing design system had become incongruous with the actual product, leading to a lot of extra developer time and friction.
Myself and another designer on the team, Jeff Ham, collaborated to create a clean and cohesive design system in Figma. We worked close with ENG to start with what existing in PROD first, move that into Figma, and refine the components.
This included tokens, variables, hundreds of components, and all the goodies you'd want and expect.
Saved a meaningful amount of time for Design and ENG.
Loom videos, Figma documentation, Detailed slack messages
Making the team’s life as easy as possible
Finally, a huge role of a Product Designer is to be easy to work with.
In every role I’ve had, I've always asked a simple question:
“How can I make my team’s life as easy as possible”
Here’s what I did to employ this principle at allUP:
Creating clear and clean documentation in Figma
Proactively sharing updates every 1~2 days on progress & blockers
Providing context and rationale for each project in concise Looms
Jumping into code (React, Swift) to parse and understand structures
Trying to find answer questions before burdening others by asking
This resulted in a great working environment. I was fortunate that team was so easy to work with. Because of that, we shipped lots of amazing projects. Here’s what my team had to say:
Dakota is very proactive and always asks questions to our devs about the product and design. He's knows our product well, which leads to his solutions being in scope and solving right thing for our ends users. Every project he's touched has resulted in a massive improvement.
Dave Grijalva
CTO, Cofounder @ allUP
see Dave endorse me
Dakota presents work extremely well and he’s increased the overall handoff quality of our team, and always has a great attitude.
Weston Westenborg
CPO & Cofounder at allUP
see Weston endorse me
Closing thoughts
My time at allUP was amazing.
It was both exhilarating and exhausting, in the best of ways.
As my first design role at a pre-seed startup, and I grew exponentially.
Working with a small and scrappy team broke a lot of beliefs of what we could accomplish, and pushed me ahead to build more than I thought was possible.
A guiding principle throughout my work at allUP was a quote (admittedly a bit cliche ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) from the legend Dieter Rams:
Less, but better
Dieter Rams
Hearing this quote is one thing.
Utilizing it and seeing the results, immensely rewarding.
I’m thankful to have done that at allUP.
Special thanks
While this case study highlighted my role, none of this work would have happened without the talented product and ENG team. A huge thanks and shoutout to everyone I worked with!
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